rike you?"

She gazed up at me, absorbing the idea and my seriousness. To my dismay,
she grew pale again.

"I--I really believe it will keep me from just dying."

I pretended to think that a joke. But I recognized that my little cousin
was on the sloping way toward a nervous breakdown.

"No baggage?" I observed. "Good! I hope you did not eat too much
luncheon. This will be an early dinner."

She waited to take off the spectacles and put them in her little bag.

"I do not need them except to study, but I didn't dare meet Mother
without them," she explained. "No; I could not eat lunch, or breakfast
either, Cousin Roger. Nor much dinner last night! Oh, if you knew how I
dread--the grind! I should rather run away."

"So we will; for this evening."

"Yes. Where--where were you going to take me?"

We had crossed the great white hall to street level, and a taxicab was
rolling up to halt before us. Surprised by the anxiety in the eyes she
lifted to mine, I named the staid, quietly fastidious hotel where I
usually took her when we were permitted an excursion together.

"Unless you have a choice?" I finished.

"I have." She breathed resolution. "I want to go to a restaurant with a
cabaret, instead of going to the theatre. May I? Please, may I? Will you
take me where I say, this one time?"

Her earnestness amazed me. I knew what her mother would say. I also
knew, or thought I knew that Phillida needed the mental relaxation which
comes from having one's own way. In her mood, no one else's way,
however, wise or agreeable, will do it all.

"All right," I yielded. "If you will promise me, faith of a gentlewoman,
to tell Aunt Caroline that I took you there and you did not know where
you were going. My shoulders are broader than yours and have borne the
buffeting of thirty-two years instead of nineteen. Had you chosen the
place, or shall I?"

To my second surprise, she answered with the name of an uptown place
where I never had been, and where I would have decidedly preferred not
to take her.

"They have a skating ballet," she urged, as I hesitated. "I know it is
wonderful! Please, please----?"

I gave the direction to the chauffeur and followed my cousin into the
cab. It seemed a proper moment to present the chocolates from my
overcoat pocket. When she proved too languid to unwrap the box, I was
seriously uneasy.

"You cannot possibly know how dreadful it is to be the only child of two
intellectual people who expe